Dashboards/Reporting as code

Data as code – the next logical step

Dear Data-Traveller, please note that this is a Linkedin-Remix.

I posted this content already on Linkedin in January 2022, but I want to make sure it doesn´t get lost in the social network abyss.

For your accessibility-experience and also for our own content backup, we repost the original text here.

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What about dashboards/reporting as code?

I came across this thought at least 4-5 times in the last weeks. For different reasons:
– Replicate & share best practises across teams and companies
– Version control your dashboards (omg)
– CI/CD pipelines with dependency testings (omfg)

When you have played around with stuff like Terraform or Pulumi I think you get the idea.

There are some possibilities already.
Superset and therefore Preset enables you to programmatically create and update charts and dashboards based on JSON files – they are hard to work with but it could be a starting point where you can add a meta layer on top to speed up things.

Oliver Laslett – do you have some plans in this direction with Lightdash? Since you do a lot of stuff like this with dbt already.

Huy Nguyen – I read your announcement for Holistics Data as code with much joy – are there already some videos about this new feature? I love the docs already (link in comments).

I am a strong believer that “as code” is the next logical step in data.